When people watch the latest series of Dragons’ Den starting this week, there’s something they may not fully realise and it’s this: The hopefuls they’re watching receive the famous handshake actually signed the deal many months ago and have had to stay quiet about it until their episode airs.
I certainly hadn’t given much thought to that gap before I entered the Den.
I appeared in series 22 – my pitch was filmed in June 2024, but it didn’t air until February 2025.
For almost nine months I was under a gag order, sitting on the news that Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones had invested £50,000 for 7.5 per cent of my business.
We could meet, but only in private, and the Dragons couldn’t really deliver their full value until the world knew they were involved. It’s possibly the strangest limbo of a founder’s life.
I’d walked in with SNOAP, a solid soap dispenser I’d invented in lockdown after discovering that UK households get through 1.8bn plastic handwash, shampoo and body wash bottles every year.
All five Dragons fought over the business for 25 minutes, which was honestly the only outcome I hadn’t prepared for.
When the episode finally aired, everything the Den promises arrived at once. The clip of my pitch has had around 5 million views, we hit our six-month sales projection in three days, and I’ve since been invited to Parliament!
Priceless
For a business built on a completely new concept, that reach is priceless. After all, people can’t switch to something if they don’t know it exists.
But the part that surprises many people is that the Dragons are not there to be business advisers.
They don’t come in, analyse and scrutinise the business, and tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing – and I wouldn’t want that anyway.
What they do brilliantly is open doors. Deborah and Peter will read a contract before I sign it, they make the right introduction at the right moment, and they lend credibility no marketing budget could buy.
It’s invaluable, but it isn’t a business strategy.
That strategic thinking has to come from somewhere else. For me, that support came through the Help to Grow: Management Course, a 12-week, 90 per cent government-funded programme for SME leaders, which I completed at Cardiff Business School at the end of last year.
I’m very open about what I don’t know. I know more about solid soap dispensers than possibly anyone else on the planet because I invented one, but marketing, brand building, systems thinking? Those were gaps and I went to plug them through the course.
One conversation changed the shape of my business. A lecturer looked at my dispenser and said: ‘you’ve got a mid-range product; you need an entry point below it and a premium offering above it’.
I’d never thought about tiering like that. I went away and built discovery sample packs, launched them just before Christmas, and they were a huge success. A premium version of the dispenser is now in development.
The Den didn’t give me that. The Den gave me reach; ‘Help to Grow: Management’ gave me the lens to look at my own business through. The course doesn’t tell you what to do, it gives you the tools to work it out yourself.
That combination – reach plus strategy – is what drives the numbers I actually care about. We’ve now diverted more than 10 tonnes of plastic from the environment, stopped over one million single-use bottles, and the average household switching to SNOAP saves over £100 a year.
So, to the founders watching Dragons’ Den and dreaming of that handshake, I’d implore them to chase it. The Dragons will open doors you couldn’t reach alone; just don’t expect them to tell you what’s on the other side of them.
Working that out is still your job, and there’s help for that which has nothing to do with television.